It's not too late to properly interrogate Christmas Day bomber Abdulmutallab

(l-r) NCTC's Michael Leiter, DNI Blair, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano

Scott Brown's stunning upset victory in Massachusetts was driven by deep voter discontent with the economy, taxes, wild spending and misguided health care "reform." But terrorism was a big issue, too. Massachusetts voters were disturbed by the Obama Administration's decision to try key 9/11 terrorists in a New York federal court. Then, when the abortive Christmas Day bombing occurred and the culprit, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was quickly Mirandized and given a court-appointed lawyer who advised him not to talk, Brown made it clear that this was no way to protect the nation -- and voters agreed.

For more than three weeks, we were told, hey, no problem, because the FBI interrogated Abdulmutallab and he talked his head off -- albeit only until his lawyer advised him to clam up -- and we gained lots and lots of good intelligence from him. While I was skeptical about this, I gave the Administration the benefit of a doubt. After all, I assumed, Obama's national security team had put their heads together and made a judgment, based on much more knowledge than I have. So I respected that.

Shockingly, it turns out that they did not put heads together. In fact, at Wednesday's Senate hearing into the matter, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified that he was never even consulted about how to treat Abdulmutallab. Michael Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told the Senate that they had not been consulted either.

So who did make the decision to question Abdulmutallab for "at least two hours," charge him, give him his Miranda warnings, and provide him with a taxpayer-paid lawyer? The President? The Attorney General? The FBI Director? It's not entirely clear whether someone higher up in the Justice Department had a hand in it, but FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that he, too, wasn't in the loop. He explained lamely that FBI agents on the ground made the decision to read Mr. Abdulmutallab his rights and get him an attorney. "It happened so fast that there was no time, really, at that point, where the transfer was made very quickly, given the moving circumstances, to determine whether alternative arrests could or should be made," said Mueller.
So, the opportunity to question a foreign terrorist who tried to blow up an airplane had to be made so "quickly" that no one could lob a call into Blair, Mueller, Leiter, Panella, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, National Security Advisor James Jones, someone, anyone? And not one of these people heard about the bombing and thought, gee, maybe I ought to make a few calls and dip my oar in on this decision?

In his testimony, Blair said that he disagrees with the decision to question Abdulmutallab as a criminal suspect and not interrogate him as an ienemy combatant (better late than never):

Mr. Blair...revealed a previously undisclosed disagreement among the Obama administration's top officials over the handling of the Nigerian who is accused of attempting to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

The intelligence chief said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been questioned by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, a special panel established by President Obama.

"We did not invoke the HIG in this case. We should have. Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people. And, you know … that's what we will do now. And so we need to make those decisions more carefully,"

The HIG was established last August in keeping with President Obama's January 2009 executive order barring the use on captured terrorists of all interrogation techniques except those countenanced by the Army Field Manual. It was to be made up of knowledgeable FBI and CIA counterterrorism officers under the FBI's lead.

"That unit was created exactly for this purpose," Mr. Blair added. "To make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution, or for some of the other means."

So the entire intelligence and national security leadership, apparatus and processes put in place by Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations since 9/11 was forgotten, ignored or side-stepped and none of the responsible officials and intelligence experts weighed in. The matter was left to some Detroit FBI agents as if it were a bank robbery.

The is appalling. But it's not too late. President Obama still has the clear-cut authority to declare Abdulmutallab an enemy combatant, drop the civilian charges, and place him in military custody where he can be questioned by that HIG. No one can say that we won't learn anything more from him than we did in that brief window when FBI agents questioned him, because absolutely no one knows what he does or doesn't know.

Mr. President, it's up to you.

What are your thoughts? Post a comment.

What happened to FBI's "internal inquiry" about why G-men ignored Fort Hood killer's contacts with a radical jihadist in Yemen?

While we're waiting for the President to tell us who failed to "connect the dots" to nab the Pantybomber before he boarded a Detroit-bound flight and nearly killed 288 innocent people, here's a related question: What ever happened to that FBI "internal inquiry" into how and why our domestic intelligence whizzes failed to act in time on the knowledge that the Fort Hood jihadist killer, Nidal Hasan, had been emailing a radical imam and al Qaeda recruiter in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki?

We now know that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab met with Awlaki when the Nigerian suicide bomber was in Yemen for talks with al Qaeda big wigs. We also know that U.S intelligence and the Yemeni government regard Awlaki as a dangerous guy and, in fact, tried (unsuccessfully it appears) on December 24th to kill him.

Unmistakably, Awlaki has been known to the U.S. intelligence community of which the FBI is a key part as a very bad guy. Yet, as I blogged shortly after the Fort Hood murders, National Security Agency intercepts of up to 20 emails between Hasan and Awlaki were sent to the FBI which "analyzed" them and decided that the chummy relationship between a serving Army officer and a jihadist mouthpiece did not warrant any further scrutiny of Hasan. Had anyone at the FBI bothered to look, they would have found a wealth of other "dots" to connect with this one, namely reports from Hasan's Army colleagues and bosses that the guy was, at the least, unhinged.

Remember, immediately after the Fort Hood massacre on November 5th, while the blood was still on the ground, unnamed FBI "sources" were telling the media that there was no "terrorism nexus." For many days, the agency did its damnedest to keep feeding confusion about the glaringly obvious fact that Hasan was a jihadist. As late as November 10th, after reports about Hasan's contacts with Awlaki were all over the media, the FBI had this to say to an incredulous CBS News:

"At this point, there is no information to indicate Major Malik Nidal Hasan had any co-conspirators or was part of a broader terrorist plot. The investigation to date has not identified a motive, and a number of possibilities remain under consideration."

A number of frigging possibilities?

It's 100% clear that the FBI was stalling and evading for weeks because it dearly wished to escape blame and accountability for its patent failure at dot connecting. The agency's leaders knew that if they shuffled long enough and eventually launched an "internal inquiry," the heat would die down and they'd be in the clear. They were right, weren't they? When was the last time you heard anything about the inquiry, which is being run -- get this -- by former FBI Director William Webster?

The most amazing political and bureaucratic success story of post-9/11 period has been the FBI's ability to fend off any encroachment on the domestic counter-intelligence role it has held since before World War II. In the old days, maybe it was because everyone in Washington feared (with good reason) that J. Edgar Hoover had some dirt on them. But what's the reason now?

Yesterday, President Obama appeared to be standing by his whole national security team, even while declaring that the "system failed." Let's hope he takes that a step further today and actually holds someone responsible -- for the failure at Fort Hood as well as the one on Christmas Day.

What's your opinion? Post a comment.

UPDATE -- I just watched President Obama's remarks on action following up the latest security review. Unfortunately, he's sticking to his no-blame approach, saying the problem was "systemic" so "reforms" are needed and in any case, the buck stops with him. Here's the thing, though: unless he really knocks heads and someone gets fired, a couple of months from now, the modified "system" will slip back onto auto pilot.

UPDATE 2 -- Hmmm. Today, someone leaked to CBS News a portion of the still-classified and unreleased Pentagon report on the dot-connection failure in the Fort Hood case. My take? The FBI did it on the classic PR theory that it would go largely unnoticed on the day Obama, Napolitano and Brennan dominated the media on the Pantybomber. Yet, it would be regarded in the future as a story already covered and, thus, "old news" by most of the media. Notice that the CBS story barely mentions "FBI."

Pantybomber aftermath: Obama says "system failed," calls it "intolerable" but stands by his national security team!

President Obama says someone "failed to connect the dots." But who?

Speaking yesterday at the White House after meeting for the first time since the Christmas terrorist attack with his whole national security team, President Obama minced no words about failure of the U.S. Government to head off this mortal threat.

President Obama said Tuesday that the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day, but that intelligence officials had “failed to connect those dots.”

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” Mr. Obama said after meeting with his national security team for nearly two hours. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

Obama said he wants action -- now:

I want specific recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong,” said Mr. Obama, who was speaking in the Grand Foyer of the White House. “I want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn’t happen again and so we can prevent future attacks.”

The "failure to integrate" charge seemed to point in one particular direction:

Mr. Obama’s stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country’s intelligence agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the organization set up after the Sept. 11 attacks to ensure that the government had a central clearinghouse for spotting, assessing and thwarting terrorist threats.

Yet, it appears that no one's head is on the chopping block:

But Mr. Obama insisted that he was not interested in getting into a blame game. White House officials said the president was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another.

Pointing no fingers himself, Obama told the 20-odd senior national security officials that "he would not 'tolerate' finger-pointing" among themselves.

But here's the serious trouble with that. Mr. President: if everyone is to blame for a major failure to protect the American people, then no one is to blame. Saying you'll hold people accountable is pretty much meaningless, if you don't actually hold anyone accountable!

The "system" that "failed" wasn't set up yesterday and needs some time to work out the bugs. The National Counterterrorism Center was set up in 2004 and placed under the new Director of National Intelligence when the latter office was established in early 2005. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center was created in 2003. And the Department of Homeland Security was established by Congress in 2002. All the other involved agencies have been around much longer.

So if someone "screwed up," in the President's words, who was it? If Obama, Congress and the rest of us don't know, how can we be sure the problem or problems ever get fixed?

Was it the National Counterterrorism Center, which was set up pursuant to the 9/11 Commission's recommendation precisely to connect the dots? Was it the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which maintains the U.S. Government's consolidated terrorist watch lists? Was it CIA officers in Nigeria or at Langley? Was it the State Department? Did DHS drop the ball? NSA had some intercepts, we're told, but did they share everything? And what about the Brits' report that their intelligence officials shared important information tying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to extremists a year ago? Last but not least, has the White House been on top of potential problems and fixes for them in the year since Obama took office?

No one should let any of this drop unless and until we see the actual people who screwed up directly or indirectly by virtue of their management or policy-making responsibilities pay a price.
What's your opinion? Post a comment.

Mystery solved: why Abdulmutallab was not on the no-fly list

Pantybomber Abdulmutallab didn't meet FBI's "reasonable suspicion" test

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father dropped a dime on him. The NSA picked up communications chatter about a Nigerian attacker. The UK had refused him a visa and the British intelligence service, MI5, had some dope on him. Nonetheless, the pantybomber walzed onto a Detroit-bound Delta flight using his own name. Why didn't all this info get him onto the no-fly list or at least the larger list of people to be subjected to added scrutiny? The President wants to know and has ordered a thorough review. The media are alive with theories about which agency failed to "connect the dots." Right and left are furiously spinning to somehow blame each other's favored politicians.

But the answer appears to be really simple: following a major finding of the 9/11 Commission, the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center "maintains the U.S. government’s consolidated Terrorist Watchlist—a single database of identifying information about those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity." But before putting anyone on any of the subsets of that watch list, the FBI insists on meeting the same "reasonable suspicion" standard of evidence required for a law enforcement officer to search your house. As L. Gordon Crovitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Timothy Healy, the head of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, explained the unit's "reasonable suspicion" standard like this:

"Reasonable suspicion requires 'articulable' facts which, taken together with rational inferences, reasonably warrant a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to, terrorism and terrorist activities, and is based on the totality of the circumstances. Mere guesses or inarticulate 'hunches' are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion."

If this sounds like legalistic language, it is. Indeed, a quick Web search was a reminder that this language is adapted from Terry v. Ohio, a landmark Supreme Court case in 1968 that determined when Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches allows the police to frisk civilians or conduct traffic stops. In other words, foreign terrorists have somehow now been granted Fourth Amendment reasonableness rights that courts intended to protect Americans being searched by the local police. Thus was Abdulmutallab allowed on the airplane with his explosives.

The difference between law-enforcement procedures and preventing terrorism could not be clearer. If a well-respected banker takes the initiative to come to a U.S. embassy in Nigeria to report that he thinks his son is a terrorist, we expect intelligence officers to make "hunches," such as that this person should have his visa reviewed and be searched before getting on a plane. Information is our defense against terrorism, but evidence of terror plots is often incomplete, which is why intelligence requires combining facts with hunches.

The result of prohibiting hunches was that Abdulmutallab was waved through. Information about suspected terrorists flows into a central Terrorist Screening Database, which is then analyzed by the Terrorist Screening Center, where FBI agents apply the "reasonable suspicion" standard to assign people to various watch lists including "selectee" lists and the "no-fly" list. It's at this point where an approach based on domestic law enforcement trump prevention, undermining the use of information.

Of course, it's also true that the others in the intelligence community might have connected the dots. And it's beyond doubt that smarter standards for screening passengers at the gates would have nailed Abdulmutallab. But the big unanswered question remains: why is the FBI using a law enforcement standard instead of an intelligence standard to "watch" possible terrorists?

In fairness to the FBI, it may feel it has to use a rigorous standard because of years of complaints and media stories like this.

What do you think? Post a comment.

(Welcome Dan Riehl readers)

Nidal Hasan's supervisor at Walter Reed warned in 2007 (!) that he was an incompetent kook

National Public Radio has gotten its hands on a memo written in May 2007 by Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan's supervisor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that by any reasonable standards should have led to Hasan's getting the heave-ho. Here's the story:

Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan's incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing. NPR has obtained a copy of the memo, the first evaluation that has surfaced from Hasan's file.

Officials at Walter Reed sent that memo to Fort Hood this year when Hasan was transferred there.

Nevertheless, commanders still assigned Hasan — accused of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood on Nov. 5 — to work with some of the Army's most troubled and vulnerable soldiers.

On May 17, 2007, Hasan's supervisor at Walter Reed sent the memo to the Walter Reed credentials committee. It reads, "Memorandum for: Credentials Committee. Subject: CPT Nidal Hasan." More than a page long, the document warns that: "The Faculty has serious concerns about CPT Hasan's professionalism and work ethic. ... He demonstrates a pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism." It is signed by the chief of psychiatric residents at Walter Reed, Maj. Scott Moran.

When shown the memo, two leading psychiatrists said it was so damning, it might have sunk Hasan's career if he had applied for a job outside the Army.

"Even if we were desperate for a psychiatrist, we would not even get him to the point where we would invite him for an interview," says Dr. Steven Sharfstein, who runs Sheppard Pratt's psychiatric medical center, based just outside Baltimore.

[snip]

The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam.

According to the memo, Hasan hardly did any work: He saw only 30 patients in 38 weeks. Sources at Walter Reed say most psychiatrists see at least 10 times that many patients. When Hasan was supposed to be on call for emergencies, he didn't even answer the phone.

[snip]

"I would never, ever hire a physician with this kind of a record," says Judith Broder, who runs the Soldiers Project, an award-winning private therapy program for troops in Southern California.

Me neither. But it seems that the Army didn't pay any attention to this red-flashing warning signal any more than the FBI took seriously Hasan's contacts with the al Qaeda-boosting radical imam, Anwar al-Awlaki.

A full Congressional probe of all this can't happen too soon.

Congratulations to NPR for staying on top of this story and digging into it. Where are the rest of the media?

Any thoughts. Post a comment.

Fort Hood Killer, Nidal Hasan, was in contact with many Islamist extremists, not just one

Really, is there anyone left who is surprised by this latest piece of news?

Fort Hood shooting suspect Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been in contact with numerous Muslim extremists -- some of whom are under federal investigation -- before last week's rampage, two U.S. officials told The Washington Times on Wednesday.

Maj. Hasan made some of the contacts while visiting known jihadist chat rooms on the Internet, according to one of The Times' sources, a senior FBI official. He said that several people with whom Maj. Hasan was in contact had been the focus of investigations by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The other source, a military intelligence official, said those in contact with Maj. Hasan are located both in the U.S. and overseas. The official said they are "broadly known and characterized as Islamic extremists if not necessarily al Qaeda."

No time to lose ramping up that Congressional investigation into why this guy wasn't nailed.

Any thoughts? Post a comment.

Congress must probe how the FBI and the Army failed to "connect the dots" to prevent Fort Hood massacre

Fort Hood killer sent emails to this radical jihadist cleric in Yemen

It's time to cut out all the bullshit and launch a thorough, detailed Congressional investigation into how and why the FBI, the Army brass, and anyone else involved failed miserably -- and fatally for 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood -- to connect the many glaring warning signals about the Fort Hood mass killer -- Malik Nidal Hasan -- and take action that would have prevented his deadly jihadist rampage.

We now know that U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted 10-20 emails that Hasan sent to Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born radical jihadist cleric and al Qaeda sympathizer now living in Yemen who served preached at a Virginia mosque where Hasan (and three of the 9/11 hijackers) worshipped.

Reportedly, the FBI decided that these repeated efforts by a serving Army officer to reach out to a well-known radical didn't warrant an investigation -- and dropped it. Meanwhile, the Army knew about Hasan's deeply disturbing and offensive "lecture" and PowerPoint presentation to other military doctors at Walter Reed in which he clearly showed his jihadist sympathies. Some in the audience complained to their superiors but nothing was done. Hasan was promoted to major and sent to Fort Hood where, among other things, he argued about the war with soldiers he was supposed to be counseling.

Forget everything else we have learned or think we have learned about Hasan so far. Forget the sterile and pointless disputes that have emerged in the media and on the blogs about whether we should call his shooting up Fort Hood "terrorism" or "crime" or the actions of a "madman" or someone "stressed" by the nature of his job. If the FBI and the Army had connected these two dots -- Hasan's contact with al-Awlaki and his often bizarre and hostile conduct -- it would have been impossible to allow him to remain as a psychiatrist on a military post.

After 9/11 and after the 9/11 Commission's recommendations were adopted, we were assured that this sort of missing the crucial connections would not happen again. But it did, and 13 people are dead.

We need to know what happened. The FBI is now conducting an "internal review" to see whether its actions were appropriate. There is absolutely no reason to leave it to the FBI to make that judgment. The Army cannot be trusted to investigate itself either. Even without knowledge of Hasan's contacts with al-Awlaki (and we cannot yet be sure the Army was not told about this), the chain of command blundered unbelievably in ignoring the obvious problems with Hasan. If that happened because of any undue timidity in confronting Hasan because he was a Muslim of Arab descent, we need to know about it (or if not, that it was just incompetence). When the Army's Chief of Staff, General George Casey, says a couple of days after a dozen of his troops were murdered at home that he's concerned about a backlash against Muslims serving in the military -- a backlash that has never happened in America despite the 9/11 attacks and all the other acts of terrorism and terrorist plots by jihadists -- we have to wonder whether the Army's leadership has its priorities straight.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is already launching an inquiry to determine what happened. Other Congressional panels with jurisdiction have also indicated an interest in investigating. While there is always a danger of Congressional inquiries politicizing any subject they handle -- including national security -- it is essential in this case that Congress step up. We must know what happened, why, who did or did not do their jobs well, and what steps we need to take to ensure that nothing like the Fort Hood massacre happens again.

What's your take? Post a comment.

UPDATE: ABC News is reporting that Hasan had "more unexplained connections to people being tracked by the FBI" than just al-Awlaki and that the names and countries of these connections would emerge soon. Meanwhile, the finger pointing has started with the Pentagon claiming (via an unnamed "top defense official," of course) that the FBI never told the Army about the intercepted communications with al-Awlaki.